Henry Kissinger

Biography

Henry Kissinger was born in Fürth, Germany, in 1923 and came to the United States in 1938 as a Jewish refugee from Nazi persecution. He studied accounting part-time at the City College of New York and served in the U.S. Army during the Second World War. He then studied at Harvard, graduating summa cum laude in 1950, and stayed on the faculty of the government department, where he directed the Harvard International Seminar from 1951 to 1971 and became known as an expert on nuclear strategy and foreign policy.

After advising government agencies and the presidential campaigns of Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon, he was appointed national security advisor by Nixon in 1969 and held the post until 1975; he was also secretary of state from 1973 to 1977 under Nixon and Gerald Ford. Practicing Realpolitik, he pursued détente with the Soviet Union, opened relations with China, conducted shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East after the Yom Kippur War, and negotiated the Paris Peace Accords, for which he shared the disputed 1973 Nobel Peace Prize with Le Duc Tho.

He was also tied to the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, involvement in the 1971 Bolivian and 1973 Chilean coups, and support for military governments in Argentina, Indonesia and Pakistan, and critics accused him of responsibility for the civilian deaths these policies caused.

After leaving government he founded the consulting firm Kissinger Associates in 1982 and led it for the rest of his life. He wrote more than a dozen books on diplomacy and international relations, briefly chaired the 9/11 Commission in 2002, served as chancellor of the College of William and Mary, and advised presidents of both parties until his death in 2023 at age 100.